Atlantia (22 page)

T
rue and I huddle together inside the cave, wet and waiting. There's not much to hear besides the water as it pushes against the walls of the cave. The constant sound of it reminds me of Atlantia breathing.

We made it.

And the sirens are dying.

My exhilaration over the success of our swim vanishes.

What have I done?

I left Maire behind because I wanted to get True away from the people in the boats, but now he's safe in the cave.

“I need to go back,” I say.

“They'll kill you, too,” True says. “We have to trust Maire and do what she said.”

“I don't know if I can.”

“You have to,” True says. “It's what she wanted. If you go back, you betray her. You need to let Maire save you.” He moves a little, readjusting his position, and then he says, his voice almost angry, “
Why
did you try to go up through the floodgates if Maire told you she could take you up a different way? You could have died.”

“Some of us don't have the luxury of knowing when Maire is telling the truth.”

“But you could have trusted me,” True says. “You could have told me what you planned to do.”

“You would have tried to talk me out of it,” I say. “You might have even turned me in to the Council to try to save my life.”

True's silent.

“I need to go back,” I say again. It is all I can do to keep my real voice from breaking through. I have to save it. Maire told me so.

Did she use her voice on me to convince me to leave her with the other sirens? Could it be that she's done all of this just to get me to the surface?

She gave me a shell, one that holds my mother's voice.

What if it tells me something that I desperately need to know?

I want to hear my mother speak. It has been more than a year without her, and I am afraid and Above.

I hold up the shell. I clutched it tight in my hand the whole time we swam, and suddenly I worry that time will have taken away her voice, that there will be nothing left but the sound of water and wind.

“I have to listen to this,” I tell True. “I can only hear it once.”

He looks at me like he did back at the lanes in the deepmarket, as if he doesn't understand but is with me anyway, and nods.

I put the shell to one ear.

And then I hear her voice and my hands start to shake. True puts his hand over mine to help me hold the shell steady, but he turns his face away to let me listen in privacy.

So,
she says.
This is everything I have learned about the sirens and the Divide and our gods.

It's her. It's really her. She must have told this to Maire, and Maire saved it. How did Maire know she would need it?

The Divide did not happen exactly the way we were taught,
my mother says. Her voice is not the one she used over the pulpit. It is low, urgent, intimate, the voice she used with someone she loved. Someone she trusted
. Some of it happened the way we've been told: People were chosen for the Above and the Below. Everyone Above had someone Below who they cared about so they would keep the Below alive.

But the rest of it, the religion, came later.

The temple, the gods, all of it, was a facade, a conceit. It was a way to make things beautiful Below while evoking the old cultures of the Above. No one believed in the gods as gods. They thought they were gargoyles. Decorations.

But then the miracles began to happen.

First the sirens, and then the bats.

And then the people came to believe. They built their religion around the miracles.

You know all this.

Thank you for unlocking the door to the Council's secret library for me. Thank you for making it so that I could read the papers. So that I could hold the evidence in my hands.

I'm sorry that I couldn't believe in your voices in the walls.

You were right.

I should have listened to you.

Because now it may be too late.

I read other things in those papers.

Did you also know that the air Above became clean enough to live in years ago? Though still polluted, it is much more safe to live there now. But by the time this happened, the Above wanted nothing to do with us. They hated us for our sirens but loved us for the ore we could deliver. So they reached a conclusion—they would keep us alive as long as the mines kept producing.

But the mines are running out of ore.

The Council of the Below decided that the Minister always had to be a true believer, which is part of the reason they selected me. How else could I convince the people if I didn't believe myself? And the people Below had to be convinced, had to believe their lives were wonderful and safe, so they could keep mining and keep Atlantia running so that we wouldn't be cut off. The people of the Above have no desire to live or work in Atlantia. They think it's dirty, broken. They think we as a people are dirty and broken, too.

We are not the only Above, and not the only Below. We are an outpost, one among many, strewn across the great islands of the sea. The cities Below were where the fortunate once lived and worked, but now the roles have been reversed.

Sirens have appeared in all the Belows. Our mines have lasted longer than anyone else. And the other Aboves have—and I cannot bear to say this—

The other Aboves have killed all their sirens. They found that it was very easy to do, because even if some of the sirens escaped the drowning of their cities, even if no one catches or kills them, they can't survive for more than a few days Above. They belong to the Below.

What? I am so shocked that I pull the shell away from my ear, forgetting that I will lose her voice. I pull it back fast, to listen again. My heart pounds hard inside my chest.

I can't live without the Below. I can't live here Above. And everyone like me has been or will be killed.

I push my hand, hard, into my mouth so that I won't scream.

We have the last sirens,
my mother says,
and it is a matter of time before the Above tells our Council to get rid of our sirens, too. And our Council will listen, because if they don't, they will die. Everything they've done to deceive us has been to save themselves when the time comes.

So
we
have to save the sirens. We have to appeal to the people of the Above and the Below, so that they will see that this is wrong.

We have to save Atlantia, too. They let us send up our child-ren once a year on the anniversary of the Divide, but I don't know how many more people the Above will allow to come up. I don't think they care about saving all of Atlantia. Though survival is possible in the Above, the people there see us as drains on their resources, as parasites. Which we were, for many years. But as things are right now, the sirens cannot live for long outside Atlantia. They can't last without the water above them.

Will you help me? I have to save you, and I have to save—

My mother stops. She doesn't say my name, but I wonder if that is when Maire realized that I could be a siren. If, when I spoke in the temple, it was the confirmation of something she'd already guessed.

Maybe if you spoke to the people Above—

It has to be a pure siren? What does that mean?

A pause. And then it sounds like she's saying something back that has just been said to her.

Someone who has saved her voice for years. Who has never used her voice for the Council. Who loves the Below as much as she loves herself. Do I know anyone like that?

I hear her breathing. She was thinking of me.

I do not.

She lied. She lied to my aunt, for me.

Or maybe she didn't think I loved the Below enough.

Perhaps you could go up and speak. Let them see what a siren really is. You could use your power for a greater good, instead of for all the Council's little evils.

I know you've done what you had to do to survive, and so have I.

But now we have to do something more.

Together.

It will take both of us to save the sirens.

It will take both of us to save Atlantia.

My mother always protected me.

And Maire was right. My mother always underestimated me.

She underestimated Bay, too.

I press the shell tight against my ear. I listen and listen and listen, but my mother is gone.

How can I tell True all of this?

He can see I'm finished. He takes his hand away from mine and wraps his arms around me. Without saying a word, he pulls me close.

His body feels warm against mine, and his breathing is as steady as the ocean. I match my breathing to his, and my body, too.

The world is coming apart around us—water through the rivets in Atlantia, sirens dying on the shore. I should feel numb, should feel nothing in the presence of too much—learning the truth about my world, learning that I can't survive for long here Above. But what I feel right now, in this moment, is True—and alive.

And he's right. I have to do what Maire said. I trust her.

“I think it's time to swim again,” I say. “To the shore this time.”

True bends his head so that it rests against mine. He will come with me.

I wonder what waits for us there, if we'll ever be together like this again. True's lips skim my cheekbone and then he finds my mouth and I kiss him back, reaching to touch the beautiful planes of his face. And I am filled with melancholy and triumph. We might die here, but we made it here, together.

Everyone dies. They don't all have the chance to see what they wanted most. At least I've seen the Above. At least I've known True.

T
he swim to the shore is longer than our quick foray into the cove, and the water feels more wild and dark now, the waves buffeting me on all sides, slapping their way into my mouth and stinging my eyes, but I feel like I recognize the swim in some way. Somehow I know how to push through it all.

That time spent in the tanks wasn't wasted.

I come ashore. True isn't far behind me.

I feel a million tiny grains of sand under my bare feet. We left our shoes in the cave because they were too heavy; they might have weighed us down. A crust of shells on the sand marks the place where the water must come highest. Neither of us says anything, but True takes my hand again as we climb the rise. In my other hand I carry the empty shell that held my mother's voice. I can't let go of it.

Grasses grow sharp in the sand, and so do small, scrubby bushes with flat, green leaves. Insects hum loudly, the sound heavy in the warm air.

Once we're over the rise, we see the city.

An
outdoor
city, bursting and sparkling with lights, and the temple spire points tall above all the other buildings.

We're barefoot, and dripping-damp. But there's nothing we can do about that. We have to hope that the near dark will be enough to cover us. “We need to hurry,” I say.

Night falls fast, but it isn't as absolute as night in Atlantia. Now and then, through the miasma of ruined air, I think I can pick out a star.

I can't help but stare at everything as we come closer—people, streets, shops—even though I don't want my gaze to invite any attention. I'm glad the swimming has removed all the siren makeup from my face, but I still feel that anyone could tell that I came from someplace else.

What did Bay think when she saw all this? What does True think now? I glance over at him, but in this light his eyes are as dark as the earth.

The Above has no gondolas, but it has other, faster, uglier ways of transport—wheeled carts spinning and racing so quickly that it's hard for me to know where I can walk and where I can't. Some of the carts are enormous. There are also many, many people walking and running everywhere, and they all seem to be in a hurry. The air is so thick and hot and moist that it has made everyone's hair bedraggled and their clothes cling with sweat, and others look as dirty and damp as we do. Still, I can't relax.
We have to get to the temple.
That is where the road ends, where Maire's instructions lead.

The voices of the people around us sound so strange, so flat after all the sirens calling, that I have a hard time understanding the words, though our language is the same. The cadence of their speaking sounds as choppy as the waves under the wind, and they have an accent I've never heard before.

Of course I've never heard it before. I've never been Above before.

The buildings are scarred and dirt- and dusk-colored, not the bright hues of Atlantia. Someone brushes against me accidentally and nods in apology but doesn't stop. I have never seen so many people moving so quickly. The Above teems with inhabitants.

I hear laughter coming from what smells like a restaurant, and shop doors stand open even though it is so late.

Atlantia is nothing compared to this. I am nothing compared to this.

And I feel light, knowing that I am nothing and that there is nothing above me but air. No water pressing down, no walls holding everything in and pushing everything back.

It is strange and unfamiliar, and I know that I can't survive here for long, but I love it. And I want to stay.

True and I become lost and found several times in the darkening streets. To get our bearings again, we find a place where the buildings aren't so close and look up to see the spire of the temple. I hurry, always conscious of the strange feeling of earth underfoot, sand between my toes, dust beneath my heels, and now and then the smooth roundness of a stone. True and I don't talk, afraid that someone will hear our accents and realize we don't belong Above, but we touch. His hand on my shoulder, me reaching back for him.

And then, without speaking, we stop at the same time.

Maire said I would know the temple, and I do, even though it's different from the one Below.

It's made of metal instead of stone, and it appears to be formed from chunks of other buildings welded together. I want to run my fingers along the rivets and see how well it all meets. And the whole building is covered in an oxidation of green, like it grew up out of the ground. I've heard of this before—pollution so bad that it can corrupt even metal, but in the moment it's beautiful.

True and I stand together, Above, in front of the temple, our clothes damp and our feet dirty. The door is not open, perhaps to keep out the air, but when I turn the handle, it moves easily. It's unlocked. It must be accessible at all hours, open to the people who need to pray, the way our temple is in the Below.

But I am afraid to enter.

Someone mutters and pushes past me. There are others who want to go inside, and I should move.

“Rio?” True asks.

“Bay,”
I say, remembering why I'm here, and I take a step inside.

The temple is fairly crowded, and no one seems to notice us come in.

I take a few more steps. It is so different and so much the same. The pews, the quietness, the softened voices and prayers. True and I walk past a woman crying and a priest comforting.

The gargoyle gods watch us. They don't adorn only the walls but also sit welded into place, like permanent worshippers, on some of the pews. Why, I wonder, and then in a moment I know, when I see their eaten faces, their pockmarked bodies, the way the air turned them green like they have been long underwater. The air. I had to weld our gods back into the trees for upkeep; the priests here brought their gods inside for shelter when the air was at its worst and have not yet taken them back out.

I stop in my tracks, utterly fascinated. High up, a seahorse curls its tail on a plinth, its head seemingly bowed in prayer while it supports the weight above. A whale with a bulbous head and startled eyes pushes out from the wall, and on the pew nearest me, a spiky-tailed shark shows its teeth. They are supposedly the same gods we have Below, with different forms, and they seem at once foreign and familiar. They would have had to make these after the advent of the sirens.

What would it be like, to make a religion? To fashion your own gods?

The pulpit is inlaid with shells from the Below, with a design similar to our waves that become trees. On their pulpit the trees turn and roll into clouds. It's beautiful. And I can't help but wonder if there are any voices trapped inside those shells. I close my hand around the one in my pocket.

As we approach the altar, I notice a large jar of water in the place where the jar of dirt sits in the temple in Atlantia.

And for a moment, I allow myself to imagine that this is another version of home, one where I find my twin and perhaps my mother, too, that she will come in to stand behind the pulpit to speak saving words to all of us, and she'll notice me and rush to take me in her arms and say,
All along we were here, Rio. We were waiting for you to come to the right place.

I'm crying now without a sound. For the loss of my mother, and for Maire. I know she's gone, too. Somehow I can tell that her voice will never again be heard under the water or over the wind.

She is nowhere Above and nowhere Below.

And neither is my mother.

But my sister might be.

“Bay?” a man's voice says, close behind me, and my heart pounds with familiarity and fear. This used to happen all the time Below—someone has mistaken me for Bay. What can I say that won't give me away?

“Bay?” the man asks again, sounding puzzled.

I turn around. But he isn't talking to me. He's speaking to the real Bay, who has stopped in the middle of the aisle leading to the altar, staring at me as if she can't believe what she sees.

And I don't believe my eyes, either, though this is where I hoped I'd find her, though this is what I wanted more than anything else for so long, though almost everything I've done has been because I knew I had to see my sister again.

I see my sister again.